Lime Blossoms and Other Pick Up Lines
by Silberias
Summary: Sherlock gave her a posy of flowers one day, and Molly followed up on a hunch that he hadn't chosen any random assortment of flowers because they were /pretty/ of all things. Sherlolly courtship through the language of flowers, based on prompt over on tumblr from Hihiyas.


From a prompt given to me on tumblr by Hihiyas, basically amounting to Sherlolly and the language of flowers. This is what I cam up with this evening. I'm kinda proud of it actually. I did my usual cursory wikipedia research because dammit this is fanfic not _Literature. _And because I'm lazy. If any readers are super into language of flowers stuff and know that I got something massively wrong about it please pipe up!

Also John is nearly Sir Not Appearing in this Fic, but he is there. Just...later. No, it's not Jollock.

Tumblr says it is extra broken at the moment, though, which is why this is getting posted here rather than over there firsties. Recently it has been the other way around. So yeah.

Thanks for reading!

Enjoy!

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Sherlock fell. Sherlock said goodbye. Sherlock left, and then Sherlock came back.

He was a different man than when he'd left, but still very much the same. He was leaner, and actually gaunt rather than just pale and peaky. Molly tried to be there for him as she could, and there was a wary appreciation in him for her efforts. As though he wasn't sure he deserved her kindness, and that pained her. She didn't ask, even when he—it could have only been him—left her a hand bouquet. Maybe another woman would have just been thrilled that the man they fancied had gotten them flowers, but not Molly.

She'd taken the small bouquet to a florist and asked them if the flowers meant anything. The man had explained what each flower was—one mignonette, two bellflowers, and a lily of the valley all carefully wrapped with oak leaves to keep the bouquet together. Molly had softly asked, turning the bouquet over to look at the flowers individually in better light, what that _meant_. The florist was about to answer when she took a step back from the counter and left the store—it was a riddle of some sort, and she was meant to figure it out. The flower combination wasn't the best in the way of color and form that Molly had ever seen, but Sherlock—Sherlock with his gloves and his expensive shoes and his twice-daily-shaves—wouldn't have made such amateur mistakes if they were _mistakes_.

She'd written down the names of each item.

Mignonette, bellflower, lily of the valley, and oak leaves.

Molly Hooper googled it, of course.

_Worth, thinking of you twice over, trustworthiness and sweetness, wrapped up in strength. _And here she'd been thinking that he'd glossed over and forgotten what she'd done for him. Not that Molly would've gotten mad at him for such, it was just…_Sherlock_.

She knew that he would probably have memorized the whole language of flowers out of some antique Victorian book, and that her efforts would be hamhanded at best—but Molly decided to try. It might be worth the effort, in this case, since Sherlock was never too good at actually verbalizing the things he felt for others. So she bought a bonsai tree—a Korean lilac—and cultivated it into blooming. It was pretty, and very her, but it would also perhaps be something which would clue Sherlock in that she'd understood. Once it was healthy enough she planned on bringing it to work and putting it on her desk in her office.

And had her bouquet been an accidental combination—and it couldn't be—then her actions would be silently totted up to more "Molly Weirdness," in Sherlock's mind and memory. It wouldn't hurt anyone, or anything.

Molly went to another florist a day later—an expensive, posh florist who carried all sorts of tropical and out of season flowers for all occasions—and bought a gardenia blossom as well as a little trio of sweet briar roses. The smell was pleasant, and she'd picked out flowers which weren't as strongly scented as those around them. The woman at the counter bound the flowers with a rich brown ribbon at Molly's request.

She went back to the lab immediately, knowing Sherlock had mentioned something about coming in after four-ish. There was just enough time to go there and leave the flowers next to his favorite microscope—another reason why Molly loved him was that he understood the idea of _having_ a favorite microscope, as she did—and then get back to her office. She had some paperwork and emails to respond to, and in the meantime Sherlock would arrive and perhaps find the little bouquet. Molly of course wasn't betting on it, as Sherlock could be quite tunnel-visioned when he was working on anything but a case.

He didn't come to visit with some revelation that he was glad she was playing along—language of flowers indeed!—until much later, in the evening nearly as Molly was packing up to go home. She'd gotten a lot of work done, and tomorrow there would be more, and that was fine. Molly jumped a little in shock when she saw the looming dark figure just next to her door as she opened it to leave—it was Sherlock, standing just a far enough away to not cast a shadow on the window of the door. His cheeks were chapped red from cold, and he had his gloves clutched in one hand. The other held a cluster of white flowers to his nose—a large star shaped flower surrounded by _clover_ of all things.

"Molly, how nice to see you're still here," he said with a faint smile, stuffing his gloves into one of his coat pockets. He took one of her hands with his own freezing ones and wrapped her fingers around the bundle of flowers, flowers bound by a lilac colored ribbon she noticed later at home, and then swiftly turned around and left. His expensive shoes carried him swiftly away, and Molly only barely caught a peek at his suit jacket beneath his coat—in the lapel a forlorn little trio of wilting sweet briar flowers were tucked into the button hole. Maybe.

There was a florist on the way back to her flat, so she stopped in and asked the hunched elderly man what the flowers were exactly—white clover, and Star of Bethlehem. This time around she stayed to listen to his rusty old voice explain each flower in detail, as well as his wonder at seeing the little Star of Bethlehem so soon after it had left his shop. A tall posh man had come asking for it not an hour ago, apparently.

Molly smiled and gave the old man a kiss on the cheek as she left, tucking one of her clovers into his shirt pocket and saying she would be back soon to buy some flowers from him. White clover meant _I promise_, after all. She kept the rest of her clover and her Star of Bethlehem, though, because of what the cluster of flowers meant from Sherlock. He was going to try to be better, and he promised.

It went on for weeks, and turned into months—at least twice a week, they would exchange flowers. Molly and Sherlock talked around their feelings in elaborate sentences which sometimes took place in the simplest of arrangements. Molly still flailed about sometimes, feeling the dullard to Sherlock's elegance—she thought her own arrangements to be too blunt for the delicate art she was learning, especially in comparison to the arrangements which Sherlock composed for her.

There was a small diary under the edge of her bed where she kept a running list of what was said, lest she forget. She didn't want to forget, especially if Sherlock tired of this game as he tired of all games in the end. Molly, though she was learning that he was a changed man, still couldn't quite trust that Sherlock wouldn't drop her and run sometime in the future.

One day, though, she came into her office in the early morning and noticed something was off about it right away. Namely, her little bonsai—having just started to fully bloom with cheery little brushes of purple lilac—was rather more mangled than she'd left it. A whole branch of the poor thing had been clipped off with surgical precision and though the branch had been rather small it still changed the look of the tiny tree significantly.

Molly hadn't wanted to believe it—the bonsai had mostly been a joke, nearly a year ago, to see if Sherlock was really doing this. A way to call his bluff. Because it had lain untouched she had started to think that perhaps he was just playing along because it was fun and obtuse—that the feelings they talked their way around were actually just her own projections. But this random attack on her tree left little doubt in Molly's mind now.

All she had to do was wait to see Sherlock, or see whatever bouquet he left her in the near future.

He often waited just out of sight of her door for her shifts to end—whatever door she was behind, if he wanted to give her something he waited outside of it. It was originally very unlike him, but Molly had started to realize that he liked to have an easy escape route from his flower deliveries. Today was no different, as she was leaving a small meeting with the pathology department a dark shadow startled her momentarily out of the corner of her eye.

Sherlock took a step forward and pressed an arrangement of flowers into her hands and tucked a single blossom behind her ear. Before she could get a word out, though, he bent down and kissed her once—and then did his usual disappearing act. Molly stood there in shock for a good six seconds before she even thought to look at what he'd given her.

In the middle of the bunch was a single mallow flower—Molly had become fast friends with the florist near her flat, and he had taught her more than she'd ever thought there to be about flowers and their old 19th century meanings—surrounded by heliotrope and forget-me-nots. In the starkly lit hallway, Molly dissected the arrangement with the same precision that she cut up bodies—being _consumed by love_ didn't really need a big show of force, and so he'd only included one mallow which was brilliantly purple. The heliotrope was for devotion, and the abundance of it was appropriate if Sherlock was going to be going around shouting that he was consumed by love. Molly couldn't help but blush, her chest and neck turning pink as well, touching the petals with one gentle index finger.

The forget-me-nots weren't quite as abundant as the heliotrope but there mere presence had her biting her lip—_true love, Sherlock? A bit sudden, yes?_

Well—perhaps not, given the last year of flirting over flower arrangements.

Speaking of the last year—Molly reached up and gently took out whatever the detective had put behind her ear. The sprig of her lilac was exactly what she expected to find, except not. It was wrapped up tightly and beautifully accented with grass. She choked out a bit of a laugh, knowing that grass was just a sign of submission, of willingness. Sherlock had realized he was in love with her, and he was fine with it. Molly wanted to run down the halls yelling it, but instead she decided to play one more move with the detective.

Edward, the elderly florist, had told her about the flower she needed—six months ago, Sherlock had given her a bizarre little handful of coriander and witch-hazel bound up in a red ribbon. Though they weren't technically flowers in Molly's mind, she'd taken them to Edward and asked what they might mean. _He thinks you've put him under a spell that makes him lust after you, Miss Hooper_, Edward had said with a wink. He had—and not as a joke—suggested she buy a whole basket of lime blossoms from one of the more expensive, luxury flower shops.

When Molly had asked her friend what those ones meant, he'd laughed and said in a stage whisper _fornication_. And then the little old man had turned bright red with embarrassment that he'd said such things to a customer in his own shop.

Well.

If Sherlock thought he could just declare undying love to her—really, though, it was more romantic than anything she'd ever read in her life—then he had another thing coming. Molly gathered up her flowers and went home early. Once her gifts from Sherlock were nicely arranged on her counter, she called up one of those luxury florists and asked how soon they could have a basket of lime blossoms delivered to 221B, Baker Street, London. When the answer was that they could actually deliver the basket tonight, Molly thanked them and put in an order to arrive at Sherlock's flat early in the afternoon tomorrow.

After that she called John to make sure he wasn't planning on spending the day visiting Sherlock—John and his wife were often visitors at Baker Street, but Molly didn't really think Mr. and Mrs. Watson would want to be around for what she had planned for Sherlock Holmes. Once she was sure John wasn't going to be around, Molly called in some favors and had her shifts covered at the hospital.

The next day Molly went to the florist she'd ordered from the night before and spent several hours looking through their flowers. The rooms were muggy and warm, hot even sometimes, but it was worth it to find the perfect flowers to surround the single lime blossom she was going to bring with her to Sherlock's. The plan was that at one, Sherlock would receive the basket and have a bit of time to think that over before Molly herself arrived.

Grass, a single forget-me-not, a few impatiens, and then the lime blossom—_I love you too, you know, but dammit we need to get in each other's pants. Now._

Hopefully that would be a clear enough answer for her detective.

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